If You Ask Me: Super-Nice, or How to Be a Female Superhero Who Stops an Interplanetary Genocide Without Messing Up Her Hair

For many years, Libby Gelman-Waxner, an assistant buyer in juniors’ activewear, moonlighted for Premiere magazine and Entertainment Weekly as the world’s most beloved and irresponsible movie critic. Now she’s been coaxed out of retirement to make her mark in online criticism, at the urging of her close personal friend, the playwright and New Yorker contributor Paul Rudnick.

Marvel and Disney have been busily patting themselves on their corporate backs for creating “Captain Marvel,” a movie about a female superhero. But watching them make zillions of dollars on a pretty safe bet feels kind of like watching Ivanka congratulating herself on empowering women while posting carefully lit anniversary photos of herself smooching Jared. Brie Larson plays Captain Marvel, and her origin story is told through a fractured series of flashbacks, as if someone dropped the movie on its head and used Scotch Tape and test screenings to put it back together.

She starts out as a military pilot named Carol Danvers, which sounds like either Betty Crocker’s younger sister or the heroine of any nineteen-fifties melodrama whose pumps match her purse. Brie is just fine, managing to express tiny flickers of amusement despite being groomed and computer-animated within an inch of her life; I keep waiting for Comic Con purists to insist that superheroes should only be played by actual superheroes. She wears a skintight, iridescent uniform designed to showcase every curve, although, in an attempt at gender-parity awareness, she’s given a tomboy childhood involving go-kart races, softball games, and being bullied. She grows up to become a more polite equivalent of the “Top Gun” dudes, striding across tarmacs in a T-shirt, shades, and leather bomber jacket, a look that my cousin Andrew refers to as Small-Town Gay-Bar Ken. Eventually, Brie is exposed to cosmic radiation and develops superpowers, which is something that rarely happens to, say, people who use tanning beds, tidy up after nuclear-core meltdowns, or simply sit too close to their flat-screen TVs or microwave ovens.

When I was a little girl, I don’t remember longing for a female superhero who’d be every bit as gloomy and vanilla as Batman, Superman, and all of the other square-jawed icons who like to stand on mountaintops with their fists on their hips, like tormented Peter Pans. I guess that true equality demands similarly grim females, since Brie is required to play a stalwart Girl Scout with merit badges in Shooting Death Rays from Her Hands, Improbably Getting Right Back Up After Having Asteroids Fall on Her, and Figuring Out a Way to Believably Utter Lines Like, “I don’t know who I am!” If Captain Marvel was any more well behaved she’d be called Commander Frozen Yogurt, or Sergeant Whole Grains.

There’s a problem with gender-swapping male franchises, a not-quite-the-same-thing awkwardness which hampered the female reboot of “Ghostbusters” and the all-girl “Oceans 8,” neither of which became as deliriously audacious as “Bridesmaids,” which was created by women from the ground up and took advantage of female archetypes and insanity. It’s also why Batgirl and Supergirl can come off as dutiful afterthoughts, especially when compared to Angelina Jolie in the “Lara Croft” movies or in her trained-assassin bloodfests like “Salt” and “Wanted,” in which Angelina got to smolder and revel in her total superiority to not just men but everyone else on earth. Brie is trapped by her spunky good-girl persona and her rigidly maintained blond curls, while the blazingly brunette Angelina got to scare people with an expertly hurled dagger and a sultry glance. Basically, if they were fighting some moron for a parking space, Brie might cautiously move on, while Angelina would leave behind only the other driver’s melted G.P.S.

I also saw “Alita: Battle Angel,” which is about a teen cyborg engineered in the same dystopian future as “Blade Runner,” “Ready Player One,” and any flick that features panoramic shots of ruined skyscrapers and junkyards littered with robot limbs. Christoph Waltz is an android repairman who discovers Alita’s head still chattering away on a garbage heap, which is how I picture Kathie Lee Gifford’s retirement. Christoph hauls the fragment home and supplies it with the lithe, impossibly dimensioned bod of a teen-age boy’s notebook doodles, with the sex-toy subtext barely held in check. Alita also sports the unnaturally large eyes of an anime heroine caught in the headlights of an oncoming Buick. She’s equipped with a body-hugging wardrobe and yearns for her true-blue boyfriend, who’s played by an actor seemingly assembled from remnants of Scott Baio, Ralph Macchio, Willie Aames, and every other teen bro from a nineteen-eighties Blockbuster rental.

Alita, whose name sounds like a budget beauty-supply franchise, eventually participates in a hyper-violent, “Rollerball”-style-arena sporting event, in order to win big bucks and book passage to a luxurious floating city populated by happy rich folks (or at least the cast of “Elysium” and every other movie featuring what looks like a Carnival Cruise ship hovering overhead to taunt the downtrodden locals). Alita and Captain Marvel are both scrappy, physically triumphant ultra-girls; they’re like genetically modified centerfolds offering spandex feminism, to the cheers of their posses, which almost always include someone with pink or blue hair.

A lot of recent superhero movies have cast esteemed older actresses as mentor figures—Nicole Kidman was Aquaman’s Mom; Carrie Fisher played a more Presidential Princess Leia; and in “Captain Marvel,” Annette Bening plays Dr. Wendy Lawson, a “Right Stuff”-style aviation pioneer who offers Brie the lowdown in denim and khakis. These ladies are always more interesting than their paycheck roles, in which they provide wise, affectionate counsel to clueless, quirk-free young people; I wonder if any studio will ever dare to portray a woman over fifty as a tentpole superhero rather than just a glorified nanny/professor/Dumbledoreen. And while we’re at it, why does every female superhero need to embody the most conservative notions of physical perfection? If a woman can detonate entire cities with a flick of her radioactive wrist, why would she need to spend so much time at SoulCycle?

If I were a superhero, here’s what I’d do: first, I’d use my power of invisibility to remain in sweatpants even while I was beheading alien monsters, especially the kind who seem to be wearing rubbery Party City Halloween costumes with pointy ears and head fins. Then I’d use my super-speed to Marie Kondo my apartment in five seconds flat, folding sweaters into those flawless rainbow pyramids that only exist in California Closet wet dreams. Then, of course, I’d build Trump’s wall in the blink of an eye, to prove it was a useless idea, after which I’d tear it down and recycle the parts. I’d end the afternoon by dangling a sputtering Donald high over a dance party thrown by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nancy Pelosi, who are both way more interesting and effective superheroes than Captain Whoever, if you ask me.